What a debut! Gas & Electric Arts, the newest addition to Philadelphia's theater scene, introduces themselves with this remarkable show by Obie-winning playwright Lisa D'Amour. I don't know whether Anna Bella Eema is a play with singing or an a capella chamber opera with movement or some other imaginative hybrid, but it works as a compelling story about madness and maternal love. It is also a showcase for three amazingly talented actors.

The plot involves Irene (Vivian Appler), mother to 10-year-old Anna Bella (Sarah McCarron); they live in a "trailer home" in a trailer park that has been demolished to make way for an interstate highway. Irene is quite mad — paranoid and agoraphobic, but also passionately imaginative and widely read. Her favorite books are about wild animals — wolves, owls, foxes — who become her surrogate selves, giving this impoverished, isolated young woman (since Anna Bella was born when she was 15, she must now be only 25) a sense of power and primal wisdom. Anna Bella is precocious — she can quote Thoreau and admonish her mother not to be "obscure" with the social worker; obscure, she tells her, is fine for Faulkner but not for her at this critical moment.

Anna Bella is also profoundly isolated — all the other families have left the trailer park and she has been homeschooled her entire life. And so, one bored day when she is playing in the mud, she makes a girl. This golem, far more than an imaginary friend, is an alter ego who ushers Anna Bella into sexual awakening; her name is Anna Bella Eema (Rainey Lacey).

The three actors sit (or jump or rock or stand or climb) on red kitchen chairs, using a variety of domestic objects — bowls, egg beaters, glasses — arranged in front of them on TV tray tables to create an astonishing variety of sound effects. But mostly they sing, separately or harmonically, in eerie, lovely, melodic voices, advancing the plot with the lyrics. They speak, too, in a variety of voices — some funny, some scary, some sweet.

I imagine this script could be produced opulently, with a conventional, invisible sound design, with complex costumes, and a realistic set. But director Lisa Jo Epstein has opted for "poor theater" and in doing so has not only succeeded in making the show fascinating but making it true to its underlying political agenda. The script is too long — the girl's dream journey feels like a children's show (and then an owl spoke and I flew, and then, and then, etc., etc.) — but the two intermissionless hours are full of theatrical pleasures.